Debt: The First 500 Posts (a thread for discussing David Graeber)

Lots of fun intra-leftist volleys on the interwebs about him lately, and a thread is long overdue given this guy's importance to Occupy, the popularity of his Debt book, etc. Jacobin, which I love, has been kind of down on him recently, and I think they may have a point. The initial Jacobin review:

http://jacobinmag.com/2012/08/debt-the-first-500-pages/

A comment thread on the review (which was re-blogged at Jacobin by Seth Ackerman):
http://crookedtimber.org/2012/08/29/debt-the-first-five-hundred-pages/

The more I read and hear this guy the less I think of him. His work always seems to rely on these simple strawman setups "people have this idea of x, but it tur s out that's not true. ". I kind of lost my ability to suspend disbelief during an interview I just heard where his example of a functioning democracy was a pirate ship. I don't mean to say I have anything against pirates, it jus seems obvious to me why the lessons of running a ship might not translate to running a society

iirc piratical visions are a thing in anarchist thought; wasn't hakim bey a piratologist?

arr.

pirates: http://jacobinmag.com/2012/08/gimme-the-loot/

the direct democracy stuff is pretty cool and i think the point of the anthropological stuff is useful in a, like, think outside the box of western collective decision making process by looking at how other ppl have done it. the way everything's qualified by some "but what can u do... democracy, rite?" is pretty annoying & i think what he's up to it worthwhile

haven't read the new book yet but i don't think he does a great job addressing how direct democracy would work in a really big rich advanced country tho, based on the interviews i've been reading lately. a decision making process that works in occupy wall street or madagascar might not work for, u know, the usa. if the section on the financial crisis in DEBT is any indication current events seem to be his weakest point. i don't think the type of statute initiatives that exist in california & a bunch of other states are what he has in mind, but there are some good reasons to be cynical about them, and i wonder what he suggests to replace them? just hope he's not all "let's organize sustainable micro-societies"--go big or go home imo

people you don't want to read the quotidian twitter quarrels of : /

The more I read and hear this guy the less I think of him. His work always seems to rely on these simple strawman setups "people have this idea of x, but it tur s out that's not true. ". I kind of lost my ability to suspend disbelief during an interview I just heard where his example of a functioning democracy was a pirate ship. I don't mean to say I have anything against pirates, it jus seems obvious to me why the lessons of running a ship might not translate to running a society

― charlie 4chan, internet detective (Hurting 2), Wednesday, April 17, 2013 11:23 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i don't know why people on twitter hate him but i feel like he just overreacted to low-level bullying, which, eh, but yeah i just straight up hate him now and worse don't trust him. read something about his new book and it seems like rank ass. there were some good insights in debt but i think he's a really lazy thinker. brad delong has a series on his blog where he reads a page of debt at a time and finds all the factual errors, it's insane how much stuff he pulls out of his ass. sucks cause there are a lot of other people who deserve the press he gets. sucks for the left too when their public intellectuals are so easily smacked down

here's another example of him just not seeing to be very smart at all
http://evonomics.com/why-capitalism-creates-pointless-jobs-david-graeber/

basically a bullshit public intellectual for the punk rock set

wow rip

holy shit

So weird this happened today as the debate around how shit the office/jobs are rages on.

whoa .... did not think that was why this thread was bumped. ... I should get around to finishing "Direct Action" -- which is basically anthropology, his trained field. I think this type of writing is where he is strongest tbh. I like his writing, though some parts, while enjoyable to read, do seem a bit, "pulled out of his ass." The first chapter in Utopia of Rules is really great, though later chapters have the posterior-product quality.

my thing with Bullshit Jobs is/was whatever its flaws as scholarship (which seems to be an issue throughout his work), it's an extremely useful (in several senses of the word) and fun concept to actually talk about with regular people and not just the already-converted

I sorta had an idea for a little while that I might try to do a podcast based on that idea, basically soliciting stories and interviews w/ people on why their individual jobs are bullshit, in much the same way as the book does, with more of a focus on the stories than any overarching theory. you could cloak voices in cases where people are worried about being identified. it would be a massive amount of work but I would absolutely listen to a well-executed version of that.

otm -- I haven't read that one, but based on what I have read, I most likely would agree.

i would listen to that podcast

anyway, 59 is no fucking age. RIP!

Always appreciated Graeber because he stood up to Hedges when the latter wrote some liberal bullshit against black bloc tactics during Occupy. Have only read a few of his books, he was a decent writer.

Some xposts, yes, Hakim Bey is a piratologist. He's also an admitted pedophile, so there's that whole thing.

He's also an admitted pedophile, so there's that whole thing.

ah yes, we should have a dedicated thread for fashionable pedophiles ...

RIP

the “he's not that smart” commentary above is absolutely hilarious btw

anyone else reading the new one?

i ordered it a couple days ago :)

oh shit ordering now. i thought bullshit jobs was kind of thin but i agreed with the premise so thoroughly it was ok

i'm just on the amazon sample of this atm but it's gripping!

haven't read it, but i enjoyed this review https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/graeber-wengrow-dawn-of-everything-history-humanity/620177/

local bookstore copies are all claimed. i think i might just go with the kindle version tbh :|

the part about the ben franklin letter concerning whites who get abducted by native americans and inevitably choose to live with the native americans had me screaming.

there were 20 people on the waitlist at the library when i checked and the book is still "on order"!

From the Atlantic review:

None of these groups, as far as we have reason to believe, resembled the simple savages of popular imagination, unselfconscious innocents who dwelt within a kind of eternal present or cyclical dreamtime, waiting for the Western hand to wake them up and fling them into history.

This seems to me like a straw man imposed upon the arguments Graeber is presumably addressing and refuting. Hard to say whether it is Graeber or the reviewer who is doing the oversimplification here. For myself, I have long concluded that for at least the past 50,000 years, humans have been in every way as complex, aware and intelligent as contemporary humans and they fully applied these qualities to solving the problems of existence. Every once in a while a new technology, like agriculture or writing was developed in that search for solutions and these opened new paths forward. Not necessarily better paths, but enticing paths leading in new directions not yet fully explored.

All that quote is doing is spouting racist garbage and crediting Graeber with being the genius who just figured out it was racist garbage.

did i hear someone making a long sniffing noise? maybe i just imagined it.

Oh hey look, a book that appears to be a synthesis of everything I've been assiduously piecing together from dozens of other books over the last several years, guess I will have to check that out.

let us know when you figure it out map

"us"

you can't be a pedantic snob all the time and claim an "us". must have somehow missed that one in your wide readings.

🖕

no need to repeat yourself

🖕🖕🖕🖕🖕🖕 - but, it's so much fun! - 🖕🖕🖕🖕🖕🖕🖕

this is not exactly edifying

anyways i bought this book and hope to start it later this week though i suspect i may not be smart enough for it. i bailed on "debt" after a while though i did finish "bullshit jobs"

the Atlantic review:

None of these groups, as far as we have reason to believe, resembled the simple savages of popular imagination, unselfconscious innocents who dwelt within a kind of eternal present or cyclical dreamtime, waiting for the Western hand to wake them up and fling them into history.
This seems to me like a straw man imposed upon the arguments Graeber is presumably addressing and refuting. Hard to say whether it is Graeber or the reviewer who is doing the oversimplification here. For myself, I have long concluded that for at least the past 50,000 years, humans have been in every way as complex, aware and intelligent as contemporary humans and they fully applied these qualities to solving the problems of existence. Every once in a while a new technology, like agriculture or writing was developed in that search for solutions and these opened new paths forward. Not necessarily better paths, but enticing paths leading in new directions not yet fully explored.

All that quote is doing is spouting racist garbage and crediting Graeber with being the genius who just figured out it was racist garbage.

― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Tuesday, November 9, 2021 3:04 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

(AHEM)

The more I read and hear this guy the less I think of him. His work always seems to rely on these simple strawman setups "people have this idea of x, but it tur s out that's not true. "....

― charlie 4chan, internet detective (Hurting 2), Wednesday, April 17, 2013 11:23 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

"meh"

the part about the ben franklin letter concerning whites who get abducted by native americans and inevitably choose to live with the native americans had me screaming.

― Linda and Jodie Rocco (map), Tuesday, November 9, 2021 2:45 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

daniel immerwahr's review in the nation fact-checked this and it turned out their one source was a thesis from 1977 actually said the opposite

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/graeber-wengrow-dawn-of-everything/

The part closest to my area of expertise raises questions. In arguing that people hate hierarchies, Graeber and Wengrow twice assert that settlers in the colonial Americas who’d been “captured or adopted” by Indigenous societies “almost invariably” chose to stay with them. By contrast, Indigenous people taken into European societies “almost invariably did just the opposite: either escaping at the earliest opportunity, or—having tried their best to adjust, and ultimately failed—returning to indigenous society to live out their last days.”

Big if true, as they say, but the claim is ballistically false, and the sole scholarly authority that Graeber and Wengrow cite—a 1977 dissertation—actually argues the opposite. “Persons of all races and cultural backgrounds reacted to captivity in much the same way” is its thesis; generally, young children assimilated into their new culture and older captives didn’t. Many captured settlers returned, including the frontiersman Daniel Boone, the Puritan minister John Williams, and the author Mary Rowlandson. And there’s a long history of Native people attending settler schools, befriending or marrying whites, and adopting European religious practices. Such choices were surely shaped by colonialism, but to deny they were ever made is absurd.

you can check the thesis in question (which is very interesting) here

https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4156&context=gradschool_disstheses

Boys and girls captured below the age of puberty almost always became assimilated, while persons taken prisoner above that age usually retained the desire to return to white civili­ zation…. An Indian child reared and cherished in a white family became assimilated in much the same manner as a white child adopted by an Indian family. The deter­mining factor was age at the time of removal from natural parents for Indian children as well as for whites...

there was a history prof who did a page-by-page reading of debt on his blog for highlighting mistakes of historical record, it was very snarky and scathing

i find the fact that david graeber is super loose with facts in this way makes me not able to get into him.

i did a cursory check on some of the stats in bullshit jobs in this thread do you have a bullshit job?

Maybe it was on another thread, but I thought I had told the story of how, when I first heard him on NPR, I was pretty fascinated, and I happened to go to that bookstore in Ft Greene (Greenlight?) and was checking out his book. A woman approached me asked "Do you mind if I ask why you're interested in that book?" I explained how I had heard him (on NPR or some podcast or something) talking about how historians and economists had this idea that money emerged as a substitute for barter, but that actually wasn't true at all, etc., and she goes, "Well yeah, I'm an anthropologist, and that's basic knowledge in anthropology. That's kind of why I was wondering why people are so interested in his book." She sounded very bitter about it.

Subsequently, when I learned more about it, it seemed to me that actually almost no one in academia with any seriousness ever believed money emerged from barter, and that this was just kind of a just-so story economists had used for illustrative purposes and probably made it into popular vernacular via business school classes.

Subsequently, when I learned more about it, it seemed to me that actually almost no one in academia with any seriousness ever believed money emerged from barter, and that this was just kind of a just-so story economists had used for illustrative purposes and probably made it into popular vernacular via business school classes.

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Tuesday, November 9, 2021 4:43 PM (thirty-nine seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

the justification of the origin of money in undergrad economics courses is intentionally ahistorical. it's more about a thought experiment involving a hypothetical world where money didn't exist to illustrate problems with barter. if one person has peaches and wants apples, but the person who has apples wants pears, then they need to find a third person who has pears and wants peaches and then they do a three-way trade. if they can't find such a person, no one trades

this is familiar to anyone who's ever participated on bunz trading zone or other online barter communities that don't let you use cash, where every transaction ends up getting resolves by "sell me your used TV and i'll buy you a case of beer"

it's more like "if money didn't exist we'd have to invent it"

The standard view in academia is that economists teach the barter theory of money as a historical fact. But it turns out: that's not true.

"daniel immerwahr's review in the nation fact-checked this and it turned out their one source was a thesis from 1977 actually said the opposite"

Was struck by how positive a review of the book this was despite that para.

the part about the ben franklin letter concerning whites who get abducted by native americans and inevitably choose to live with the native americans had me screaming.

― Linda and Jodie Rocco (map), Tuesday, November 9, 2021 2:45 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

daniel immerwahr's review in the nation fact-checked this and it turned out their one source was a thesis from 1977 actually said the opposite

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/graeber-wengrow-dawn-of-everything/

The part closest to my area of expertise raises questions. In arguing that people hate hierarchies, Graeber and Wengrow twice assert that settlers in the colonial Americas who’d been “captured or adopted” by Indigenous societies “almost invariably” chose to stay with them. By contrast, Indigenous people taken into European societies “almost invariably did just the opposite: either escaping at the earliest opportunity, or—having tried their best to adjust, and ultimately failed—returning to indigenous society to live out their last days.”

Big if true, as they say, but the claim is ballistically false, and the sole scholarly authority that Graeber and Wengrow cite—a 1977 dissertation—actually argues the opposite. “Persons of all races and cultural backgrounds reacted to captivity in much the same way” is its thesis; generally, young children assimilated into their new culture and older captives didn’t. Many captured settlers returned, including the frontiersman Daniel Boone, the Puritan minister John Williams, and the author Mary Rowlandson. And there’s a long history of Native people attending settler schools, befriending or marrying whites, and adopting European religious practices. Such choices were surely shaped by colonialism, but to deny they were ever made is absurd.

you can check the thesis in question (which is very interesting) here

https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4156&context=gradschool_disstheses

Boys and girls captured below the age of puberty almost always became assimilated, while persons taken prisoner above that age usually retained the desire to return to white civili­ zation…. An Indian child reared and cherished in a white family became assimilated in much the same manner as a white child adopted by an Indian family. The deter­mining factor was age at the time of removal from natural parents for Indian children as well as for whites...

there was a history prof who did a page-by-page reading of debt on his blog for highlighting mistakes of historical record, it was very snarky and scathing

i find the fact that david graeber is super loose with facts in this way makes me not able to get into him.

i did a cursory check on some of the stats in bullshit jobs in this thread do you have a bullshit job?

― flopson, Tuesday, November 9, 2021 9:40 PM (sixteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i don't see how any of this invalidates this short and funny section, he doesn't claim that all of these encounters end up this way and uses the ben franklin letter as a funny framing. anyway, this subject is always hotly contested and at this point i don't really trust anyone to give some kind of objective overview of the phenomenon, i don't think that's actually possible? but yes i don't really doubt that all of the facts aren't presented equally in what david graeber writes, mainly because he's trying to put forward a vision that exists, in other books as others itt have so astutely pointed out, but is always kind of put on the backburner and is never synthesized so convincingly. i'm not shocked that he doesn't treat social science as a strict 'science,' which if the last 50 or so years have demonstrated anything it very clearly isn't, it's a creative endeavor.

xp to man alive, i guess i haven't read as much on the subject as you but it's the kind of apologia for market economics that is very much present and believed by people who aren't necessarily academics.

anyway this book has been out for 0 days and i was enjoying the sample. but i guess i don't have to bother posting that since ilx has already debunked the whole thing, phew!

sorry, i didn't mean to offend you and imply that you shouldn't read the book. i personally know a couple academics whom i consider insanely deeply knowledgeable of history and anthropology who love his books. just giving my personal reason why i felt unsatisfied by the 2 books of his that i've read. reading the book more as a creative work with a loose relationship to scare-quote "the facts" is probably a good way to do it. it's kinda like what people say about adam curtis

xp - sounds from immerwahr's review like it might come up a couple more times in the book

thumbs up, thanks, you didn't offend me, i was being a little dramatic. i appreciate the background on that and tbh it's probably a great idea to check the footnotes as i go.

reading the book more as a creative work with a loose relationship to scare-quote "the facts" is probably a good way to do it. it's kinda like what people say about adam curtis

tbh this is how i read most books and i read a lot of non-fiction. i don't remember most things i read or believe anything so it works ok.

this from the early graeber:

"In a book called The White Goddess: An Historical
Grammar of Poetic Myth, he claimed to map out the
rudiments of her calendar rites in different parts of
Europe, focusing on the periodic ritual murder of the
Goddess’ royal consorts, among other things a surefire
way of guaranteeing would-be great men do not get
out of hand, and ending the book with a call for an
eventual industrial collapse. I say “claimed” advisedly
here. The delightful, if also confusing, thing about
Graves’ books is that he’s obviously having so much
fun writing them, throwing out one outrageous thesis
after another, that it’s impossible to tell how much of
it is meant to be taken seriously."

xp to man alive, i guess i haven't read as much on the subject as you but it's the kind of apologia for market economics that is very much present and believed by people who aren't necessarily academics.

― Linda and Jodie Rocco (map), Tuesday, 9 November 2021 22:08 (yesterday) link

I wouldn't mind if he just said "there's a popular myth that ___, but actually it's not true." That would be fine, and probably accurate. But setting himself as doing groundbreaking work on these points that upends academic conventional wisdom is deeply aggravating and makes me less open to the whole project. It's been a long time since Debt, but my bigger problem with it at the time was that I just couldn't make coherent sense of what his thesis about money actually was in the end, and it didn't seem to make any sense. I don't know if that was his fault or mine.

Not defending it, but I think that sort of thing is a hazard of anyone who positions their writing as para-academic public intellectual type stuff. I don't think FSG is gonna publish your anthropology book unless you're "upending long held shibboleths" etc. Proper academic writing does this to an egregious extent as well. I find it best to ignore claims to originality in general.

Maybe it was on another thread, but I thought I had told the story of how, when I first heard him on NPR, I was pretty fascinated, and I happened to go to that bookstore in Ft Greene (Greenlight?) and was checking out his book. A woman approached me asked "Do you mind if I ask why you're interested in that book?" I explained how I had heard him (on NPR or some podcast or something) talking about how historians and economists had this idea that money emerged as a substitute for barter, but that actually wasn't true at all, etc., and she goes, "Well yeah, I'm an anthropologist, and that's basic knowledge in anthropology. That's kind of why I was wondering why people are so interested in his book." She sounded very bitter about it.

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Tuesday, 9 November 2021 21:41 (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is not what this book is about? its also quite clearly articulated by graeber throughout the book that the barter theory of money is long dismissed by anthropologists yet is an enduring just-so story in textbook economics and popular discourses.

the subject of the book is the complex but persistent relation way that debt (as a societal contract) has throughout history been accompanied by coercion and violence. There are very interesting and I think often original observations in the book about this relation and in particular the development of states and money-systems in tandem.

Listening to The Dawn of Everything on Audible and I have to say I really enjoy the writing style and the way it's unfolding, yes, in much the same way Adam Curtis films are a total ride

my dad got me Dawn of Everything for xmas (i gifted him Debt back in 2011)

the barter economy is real

the barter economy is real

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Thursday, January 6, 2022 1:35 PM (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

the point Graber makes in Debt (and plaxico is right that this is something he brings up in the first chapter and was quoted a lot in press but is not the whole point of the book) (except as a rhetorical justification for not engaging with any monetary economics from a 500 page book about debt--something that would have improved the book, as argued in this review by mike beggs in jacobin) is that the barter origin story of money is false as an account of the historical development of money. as i explained upthread in this post the way the origin of money is taught in economics courses is ahistorical. but rather than being presented as history (as Graeber claims), it's presented as a thought experiment: students are made to imagine a barter economy in which money doesn't exist, and to see how money solves the problem of the double coincidence of wants

that was a joke about you buying your dad a book called "debt" and him buying you another book.

Not defending it, but I think that sort of thing is a hazard of anyone who positions their writing as para-academic public intellectual type stuff. I don't think FSG is gonna publish your anthropology book unless you're "upending long held shibboleths" etc. Proper academic writing does this to an egregious extent as well. I find it best to ignore claims to originality in general.

― ryan, Wednesday, January 5, 2022 12:33 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

there are plenty of social scientists who don't get caught making these kinds of fudges in their popular writing. one example of book in a somewhat similar vein to graeber that maintained rigor was 'secret of our success' by jo henrich. that book was published by a university press but the follow-up ('the weirdest people in the world' which came out last year and i have yet to read) was published by fsg. i've read several reviews of both books and none brought up errors of fact or attribution. imo it's a largely avoidable "hazard" and is more about the choices the writer makes than something fundamental to the incentives of publishing as a public intellectual

xp- lol

the barter economy is real

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Thursday, January 6, 2022 1:35 PM (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

the point Graber makes in Debt (and plaxico is right that this is something he brings up in the first chapter and was quoted a lot in press but is not the whole point of the book) (except as a rhetorical justification for not engaging with any monetary economics from a 500 page book about debt--something that would have improved the book, as argued in this review by mike beggs in jacobin) is that the barter origin story of money is false as an account of the historical development of money. as i explained upthread in this post the way the origin of money is taught in economics courses is ahistorical. but rather than being presented as history (as Graeber claims), it's presented as a thought experiment: students are made to imagine a barter economy in which money doesn't exist, and to see how money solves the problem of the double coincidence of wants

― flopson, Thursday, 6 January 2022 18:47 (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

again, this is exactly what graeber himself says. he says that it is a just-so story in textbooks that we are asked to 'imagine' a history that didn't exist. He quotes several textbooks as saying this. he notes the prevalence and pervasiveness of this idea in people's general imagination. i was certainly taught it at school, decades after it was widely disproven. in fact, that so many popular reading got hooked on some idea that he 'disproved' it I think is revealing somewhat of the extent to which people generally take it to be the case to this day. he frames it as a myth. a story that people tell to underpin or anchor something 'real' (exactly as you described). he suggests that this myth may have some larger hold on the collective imaginary regarding what money 'is' or contribute to economic understandings. on this last point he suggests there's two good reasons to think it does, its persistent presence in these text books as such a myth, and its roots in such a seminal text as 'the wealth of nations.' It really couldn't be clearer.

the historical origin of money predates written history, so we have no idea whether the economist textbook myth is true or not, and we can never prove or disprove it

what graeber does try to disprove is the argument (which he attributes to economists without citation, but which i've never seen one argue) that all non-monetary economies used barter, and that the historical sequence is 'first there was barter, then there was money, then there was credit'

now, the historical record does include many instances of barter. take it from graeber himself:

All this is not to say that barter never occurs. It is widely attested in many times and places. But it typically occurs between strangers, people who have no moral relations with one another.

however, anthropologists have never found an economy where barter is used among its own members. what they do instead is have norms and customs that let them keep track of debt and credit. since this inverts the barter -> money -> credit sequence, graeber contends to have disproved the theory (and all of economics along with it)

this rests on a few assumptions

(i) the type of trade relevant to the origin of money is trade between people with moral relations to each other. the existence of barter between people with no moral relations to each other is not relevant to the origin of money

(ii) the anthropological record is a reliable approximation of prehistoric societies where money originated

i have no idea about (ii) but i think (i) could be wrong. here's two examples

suppose that two societies without moral ties to one another use barter for trade with each other, and their production becomes increasingly advanced such that they start producing a larger set of more complex goods. if barter gets unwieldy due to the trouble satisfying double coincidence of wants, money could emerge

alternatively, if one society uses non-barter and non-money methods grows larger and a larger share of its population have weak moral ties with one another, they may start bartering.

the irony of all this is that money is *not* important to economics. like maybe 95% of all economics ignores money or abstracts from it in order to focus on "real" quantities. for the most part, money is an index. it's just a technology that simplifies keeping track of property claims. money is epiphenomena or superstructure, what matters in most economic models are relations of production, factors, technologies, information, preferences. (this is something i always try to tell ppl i know who start to get into crypto/bitcoin). on some level graeber knows this, because he named the book debt. debt is way more important than money, even in neoclassical economics!

it's logically possible for the historically contingent reason something came to exist to not align with the reason for its continued existence, and the latter is what economics textbooks emphasize. to make a silly analogy, the internet was created by DARPA but military communications technology doesn't matter at all for the continued usefulness of the internet

reliving c. 2011-12 debates about Debt is getting me stoked for Dawn of Everything XD

flopson is otm. We have no idea how people thought about or used money in the first instances of its use. The mostly-justified presumption that some kind of utility is connected to its emergence leads us to imagine that the utility involved closely resembles the kind of utility that money provides in historical times, especially in modern times. No evidence exists to substantiate these speculations. There is some evidence that, once coined money existed, its utility for mediating exchanges of widely heterogeneous goods was quickly understood.

People are quick to grasp such benefits. Arbitrage was probably invented even before learning how to use coined money to facilitate trade between independent societies/economies. Money just lubricated that process.

"what graeber does try to disprove is the argument (which he attributes to economists without citation, but which i've never seen one argue) that all non-monetary economies used barter, and that the historical sequence is 'first there was barter, then there was money, then there was credit'"

again I'd love to know where in the book you found this. I've described to you what he actually does do in the short opening chapter of this book where he supposedly makes these contentious claims.

I don't think its the greatest book of all time or anything, but its sortof weird to me how frequently the most sneery dismissals I encounter of it seem to be premissed on the reader not understanding (maybe not having read?) very simple passages from the book.

i didn't mean to be sneery, sorry if that was the impression. despite being sloppy with facts, i find Graeber a very generative thinker as well as a gripping (if occasionally purple) prose stylist. i read the whole book and saw him give a talk about it in 2011, and read at least a dozen blog posts and reviews (and hundreds of tweets) debating it

i refreshed my memory of Debt by skimming contemporaneous posts and interviews before writing my last post. unfortunately i don't have a copy of it handy (i've moved cities twice in the last 8 years and it's in a box in my moms basement), but here's a quote from the blog post by Graeber that i linked to in my last post where he reiterates the argument from Debt (emphasis mine):

19th century economists such as Stanley Jevons and Carl Menger[1] kept the basic framework of Smith’s argument, but developed hypothetical models of just how money might emerge from such a situation. All assumed that in all communities without money, economic life could only have taken the form of barter. Menger even spoke of members of such communities “taking their goods to market”—presuming marketplaces where a wide variety of products were available but they were simply swapped directly, in whatever way people felt advantageous.

Anthropologists gradually fanned out into the world and began directly observing how economies where money was not used (or anyway, not used for everyday transactions) actually worked. What they discovered was an at first bewildering variety of arrangements, ranging from competitive gift-giving to communal stockpiling to places where economic relations centered on neighbors trying to guess each other’s dreams. What they never found was any place, anywhere, where economic relations between members of community took the form economists predicted: “I’ll give you twenty chickens for that cow.” Hence in the definitive anthropological work on the subject, Cambridge anthropology professor Caroline Humphrey concludes, “No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing”[2]

Just in way of emphasis: economists thus predicted that all (100%) non-monetary economies would be barter economies. Empirical observation has revealed that the actual number of observable cases—out of thousands studied—is 0%.

Similarly, the number of documented marketplaces where people regularly appear to swap goods directly without any reference to a money of account is also zero. If any sociological prediction has ever been empirically refuted, this is it.

Economists have for the most part accepted the anthropological findings, if directly confronted with them, but not changed any of the assumptions that generated the false predictions. Meanwhile, all textbooks continue to report the same old sequence: first there was barter, then money, then credit—except instead of actually saying that tribal societies regularly practiced barter, they set it up as an imaginative exercise (“imagine what you would have to do if you didn’t have money!” or vaguely imply that anything actual tribal societies did do must have been barter of some kind.

just to briefly restate my argument in light of this quote (that hopefully we can agree represents Graeber's argument):

- the fact that Jevons "developed hypothetical models of just how money might emerge" from barter does not imply that economists (or even Jevons himself) predict that money originated from barter, or that barter is even widespread. the model may merely exist to illuminate the abstract merits of money relative to barter. it may seem weird to pursue this kind of exercise without making a claim about actual historical or empirical fact, but it's very common in economic theory

- even if we grant that economists predicted that all non-monetary societies used barter, it's not clear that the anthropological record is dispositive. there are 2 reasons for this:

1. societies to which anthropologists "fanned out" may not be representative of pre-historic societies where money originated and which we can't observe. specifically, there is potential for selection bias: maybe there is some common factor among certain societies that makes them less likely to invent money, and that factor is also correlated with them also being less likely to use barter. an example of such a factor may be having large populations. it's tempting to want to use ethnography to peer behind the curtain of history, but any inference requires assumptions

2. it could be that barter lead to money, not through the expansion of barter among people with "moral ties to one another" (of which there is no anthropological record), but through traders without moral ties to one another (of which there is record). later on in the post, Graeber gives the example of Mesopotamian trade accounts where it seems silver was used as medium of account

[T]he first records we have of money are administrative documents from Mesopotamia, in which money is used almost exclusively in keeping accounts within large bureaucratic organizations (Temples and Palaces), the system is based on a fixed equivalence between barley and silver, and that since silver was a trade item, this shows that Mesopotamian merchants must have been using silver as a medium of exchange in spot transactions with long-distance trade partners for that system to then be adopted as a unit of account in administrative transactions within Temples.

- none of this really matters, since nothing economists believe hinges on prehistoric barter, and most economists don't think money matters for the "real economy" that much (aside from episodes like debt crises or hyperinflation). i think Graeber's is spot on in his larger point: that economists severely restrict their "imaginations" by assuming economies of isolated, impersonal individuals with no moral obligations to one another. in the quote above he briefly mentions examples of how non-monetary societies are able to manage credit and debt through other means (the bit about "economic relations based on neighbors trying to guess each other’s dreams"). that point is well-taken (although it's hard to imagine strong bonds in economies with millions of participants, and the examples he gives are all of relatively small societies). imho there are better ways to make it than couching it in an irrelevant and speculative "gotcha" argument about barter and economics textbooks (although as we've mentioned that was a huge selling point for the book in the popular press, so it was wise from a marketing perspective)

I'm not really sure what you're arguing here. Graeber's reason for using the example from economics textbooks stems from exactly the reason that it is used in economics textbooks. It illustrates a conceptual understanding of 'exchange' that is, once one begins to examine it fairly incoherent but is offered as a kind of epistemological root. that is, a conceptual 'starting point' that makes sense to develop economic understandings from, and his point is that the human relations that exchange and money emerge out of are too complex and social for this to make sense and that this is borne out by the fact that no evidence of barter economies preceding preceding monetary economies exists. I don't see how this is a 'gotcha,' its merely reiterating an illustration that economists have been very happy to preserve and offer as an entry point to understanding of their discipline for quite some time and this using this example to illustrate how the abstraction of 'economics' from much more quotidian aspects of human interaction is fundamentally flawed and an ass-backward simplification that starts from the wrong place.

Again I think it should be possible to argue with this point without trying to refute arguments he doesn't make. You already said the book says that what's wrong with it is that it argues that he claims that economics textbooks claim that the historical origin of money is in barter. He doesn't.

"the fact that Jevons "developed hypothetical models of just how money might emerge" from barter does not imply that economists (or even Jevons himself) predict that money originated from barter, or that barter is even widespread. the model may merely exist to illuminate the abstract merits of money relative to barter. it may seem weird to pursue this kind of exercise without making a claim about actual historical or empirical fact, but it's very common in economic theory"

Yes exactly, it doesn't.

to reiterate:

"Economists have for the most part accepted the anthropological findings, if directly confronted with them, but not changed any of the assumptions that generated the false predictions. Meanwhile, all textbooks continue to report the same old sequence: first there was barter, then money, then credit—except instead of actually saying that tribal societies regularly practiced barter, they set it up as an imaginative exercise (“imagine what you would have to do if you didn’t have money!” or vaguely imply that anything actual tribal societies did do must have been barter of some kind"

On your other point, I'm not really interested in being drawn into arguing that money has not been disproven to have been prefigured by barter economies.

Graeber's reason for using the example from economics textbooks stems from exactly the reason that it is used in economics textbooks. It illustrates a conceptual understanding of 'exchange' that is, once one begins to examine it fairly incoherent but is offered as a kind of epistemological root. that is, a conceptual 'starting point' that makes sense to develop economic understandings from, and his point is that the human relations that exchange and money emerge out of are too complex and social for this to make sense and that this is borne out by the fact that no evidence of barter economies preceding preceding monetary economies exists.

i mostly agree with this. i don't think economists consider it their task to "characterize the human relations that exchange and money emerge out of" (more on that below). it's much less ambitious than that

Again I think it should be possible to argue with this point without trying to refute arguments he doesn't make. You already said the book says that what's wrong with it is that it argues that he claims that economics textbooks claim that the historical origin of money is in barter. He doesn't.

i can't parse this, but i'm still not clear on which arguments of his i'm refuting that he doesn't make. i'm trying to be transparent and stay close to the text of the post i'm quoting

"the fact that Jevons "developed hypothetical models of just how money might emerge" from barter does not imply that economists (or even Jevons himself) predict that money originated from barter, or that barter is even widespread. the model may merely exist to illuminate the abstract merits of money relative to barter. it may seem weird to pursue this kind of exercise without making a claim about actual historical or empirical fact, but it's very common in economic theory"

Yes exactly, it doesn't.

we either agree or misunderstand each other here. Graeber is clear that he interprets this as a prediction, and that he considers the anthropological record an empirical test of that prediction:

Just in way of emphasis: economists thus predicted that all (100%) non-monetary economies would be barter economies. Empirical observation has revealed that the actual number of observable cases—out of thousands studied—is 0%.

what i'm saying is that the purpose of the model isn't to predict. rather than economists pivoting to an "imaginative exercise" after being embarrassed by the anthropological record's rejection of their prediction, it was an imaginative exercise all along. this happens all the time in economic theory. to illustrate gains from exchange economists going back to Ricardo contrast exchange with "autarky", a hypothetical state of the world where no one can trade with each other. that doesn't mean that economists believe there was a time in history when no one exchanged with each other. the point is to use the stark and abstract comparison to illustrate gains from exchange. same with barter and money

Graeber misses this, but he's right on the broader point: that economics is unimaginative about social relations. whether you think that's a flaw or a virtue is up to taste. Graeber, a self-described anarchist and student of Marshall Sahlins, finds the possibilities inherent in the multitude of social relations in small-scale tribal societies thrilling. economists implicitly only consider large-scale societies where most people have no relation to each other yet are still connected indirectly through a complex web of economic transactions. whether you see this as close-minded or pragmatic (given most people live in large societies) is a matter of taste. (Graeber later on in the post accuses economists of themselves inventing large impersonal societies, but i think that's giving them way too much credit). i read 'The Original Affluent Society' and 'The Art of Not Being Governed' when i was a teen and they blew my mind, but ultimately i think a return to primitivist small-scale society is unfeasible and probably undesirable. and it's hard for me to see what lesson we're supposed to draw for existing economies today if we stay large-scale from examples like these:

The first example is from the Amazonian Nambikwara, as described in an early essay by the famous French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. This was a simple society without much in the way of division of labor, organized into small bands that traditionally numbered at best a hundred people each. Occasionally if one band spots the cooking fires of another in their vicinity, they will send emissaries to negotiate a meeting for purposes of trade. If the offer is accepted, they will first hide their women and children in the forest, then invite the men of other band to visit camp. Each band has a chief and once everyone has been assembled, each chief gives a formal speech praising the other party and belittling his own; everyone puts aside their weapons to sing and dance together—though the dance is one that mimics military confrontation. Then, individuals from each side approach each other to trade:

If an individual wants an object he extols it by saying how fine it is. If a man values an object and wants much in exchange for it, instead of saying that it is very valuable he says that it is worthless, thus showing his desire to keep it. ‘This axe is no good, it is very old, it is very dull’, he will say… [8]

In the end, each “snatches the object out of the other’s hand”—and if one side does so too early, fights may ensue.

The whole business concludes with a great feast at which the women reappear, but this too can lead to problems, since amidst the music and good cheer, there is ample opportunity for seductions (remember, these are people who normally live in groups that contain only perhaps a dozen members of the opposite sex of around the same age of themselves. The chance to meet others is pretty thrilling.) This sometimes led to jealous quarrels. Occasionally, men would get killed, and to head off this descending into outright warfare, the usual solution was to have the killer adopt the name of the victim, which would also give him the responsibility for caring for his wife and children.

"what graeber does try to disprove is the argument (which he attributes to economists without citation, but which i've never seen one argue) that all non-monetary economies used barter, and that the historical sequence is 'first there was barter, then there was money, then there was credit'"

he does not try to disprove this argument as he never alleges that economists make this 'historical' argument. He claims that their persistent use of this myth as underpinning a very introductory thought experiment is *indicative* of the abstraction of economics from sociality. (and etc)

Its fine to disagree with points he makes in the book! Happy for you do do so. My only qualm was that it should be possible to disgree with the book without suggesting he says things he doesn't and then dismissing those misattributed ideas. to do so on the subsequent grounds that he is playing fast and loose with the facts seems deeply rude though. I'm not suggesting that there may not be disputable facts in the text, but its not very confidence inspiring when the first one you bring up is not in fact something he says in the text.

i will say that graeber does not in fact miss this unless when you say "graeber misses this" what you mean is that it is possible to take one small quote from a blog post and subject it to a very unsympathetic reading that suggests he means something he gives no other indication of meaning. With those very specific caveats then yes, "graeber misses this."

Hugely disappointed that @anthropologytod chose to put this nasty ad hominem attack on the late David graeber in as the frontispiece to this issue, w @davidwengrow s reply shoved in at back. This is not a book review, it’s dancing on a grave pic.twitter.com/T0LXXOsWbz

— Brenna Hassett (@brennawalks) March 10, 2022

article and response here https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/14678322/2022/38/1

Started The Dawn of Everything the other day. Apart from the main thrust I'm enjoying the things they throw out there without further analysis, like middle ages europe was, globally, an 'obscure and uninviting backwater', or that the western idea of 'a government of bureaucratic officaldom trained in the liberal arts whose members had succeeded in passing competitive exams' came from china, where it existed for centuries before being adopted by the west. The second chapter dealt with such a handful of different, related, questions, and tackled them from so many different angles, that it was hard to grasp the big picture, but it's getting a bit more focussed now. I should probably be taking notes to appreciate it fully though.

I highly recommend The Dawn of Everything, it's hugely entertaining, educational, and enlightening. I am very much there for the anticapitalism/anarchism but, not to trivialise, without it - certainly without the first couple of chapters and their rather confusing notion of the origin of inequality - it would make a great pop science book on early civilisation.

They are disdainful of others' simple classification schemes e.g. old/middle/new kingdoms of ancient egypt, but very keen on their own, in particular their
trinity of domination (control over violence (sovereignty), control over information (bureaucracy), and charismatic competition (politics)) and
trinity of freedoms (freedom to move, freedom to disobey, freedom to reimagine society) (and I feel like there was a third one making a trinity of trinities but I can't recall it any more). These taxonomies are certainly thought provoking but it feels a bit like they cherry pick their data or stretch definitions, especially when claiming their societies fit into patterns of implementing one, two, or three of the forms of domination. But in a way that makes it more fun to engage with.

I've started on Debt. In the first chapter he quotes this Steven Wright joke (differently worded but same idea) to make some point about debt and violence. i don't get it (as a joke), please explain:

I owed my friend George $25. For about three weeks I owed it to him. The whole time I had the money on me -- he didn't know it. Walking through New York City, 2:30 in the morning and got held up. He said, "Gimme all your money." I said, "Wait a minute." I said, "George, here's the 25 dollars I owe you." The the thief took a thousand dollars out of his own money and he gave it to George. At gunpoint he made me borrow a thousand dollars from George.

is the joke-teller a person and is their friend a bank and is the thief the government and is it that when the government finds that the person it aims to tax has only $25 it is happy to give a huge sum to the bank in order that it can be loaned to the person thereby increasing the government's taxation income ? idgi either

The point he's making in the book is that who owes what to whom - whether something is a loan or a liability - is (or can be) dependent not on simple economics but on the balance of power (and the threat of violence). But - I just don't get it as a joke! I love Steven Wright but if I heard that in a set I'd just go... what?

Some years ago I was in a band and we made a record, which entailed expenses for studio time and mastering and CD pressing and sleeve printing.

At the time I was a wealthy person and I paid for a bunch of these things up front, but I still wanted to be reimbursed. There were a bunch of different expenses and incomes involved, because we also had paid gigs.

The keyboard player was a mathematician, and did some wizard shit where he like, turned to the guitarist and said, "okay, you give her $16 (pointing to the bassist). I will give you $4. Now everyone gives Puffin $22."

To this day I don't quite understand what happened, and it's possible that someone got screwed, but in the moment I just went with it because he sounded really confident.

The joke up to the part where he repays George as they’re being robbed is pretty standard Borscht-belt comedy. The coda about the $1000 is Wright pushing the joke into slightly surreal (and less funny) territory IMO.

Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology is a gem

at the beginning of this book, he mentions the barter thing and instead posits that what came first was a "gift economy" -- which sadly reminds me first and foremost of Burning Man -- but fortunately the book is mostly about anarchists and organizing as opposed to an economic argument I am somewhat skeptical about.

Gift and status and subsequent understandings were something conquistadors got heavily confused by in several stories I've heard.

Partially through having an overconfident idea of their own status

I need to read Matthew Restall's work on the interaction between Spain and Mesoamerican infrastructure because he talked about that in interviews i heard a couple of months ago.
Montezuma etc giving great wealth as gift to show how very wealthy they were and conquistadors seeing it as an act of fealty not something with an expectation of being matched and possibly increased.

& part of the gift giving economy was to escalate the value of the gift given leaving the other party needing to match it or be in debt I think. Think I saw Gaeber hismelf talking about that in a talk from around teh time Debt came out.

yeah ... that's part of the awkwardness I felt around that term. Like, there are obligations and cultural assumptions around the value of the gift in these cultures, at least that's how I read it. And then you have the term appropriated by Burning Man (and contemporary things like it) where the "gift economy" is just supposed to be about "giving" and not as part of a transaction. So I feel like it is something often misunderstood.